Who Makes the Donuts?

Seems Clifford lost a $16,000 earring (Never mind whether or not it can

dangle from your ear — do you have anything in your house that costs

$16,000? Me neither.) and a reporter suggested he might be in trouble

when he explains the loss to his family. Replied Floyd: “I make the

donuts.”

Yo! I'd call that game, set, match for Clifford. (Whose real name is Cornelius, but we don't talk about that.)

Coming back from the Bowery Ballroom it was my cabbie doing his best to

make the donuts — any road that hasn't been salted is basically a

funhouse ride right now. When my cabbie was pushing another cab in

front of him, the speedometer said 70, you could smell something

burning and we still weren't going anywhere, I thought to myself, I live two blocks from here — why in hell don't I get out and walk? I guess, as with the second half of the 2003 season, I just had to see what would happen.

Maybe it was that little hint of mortality that got to me, or winter

leaping out of its pine box to grab us by the throat again, but exiting

the game of Bumper Cabs I found myself thinking about Doc and Darryl,

and suddenly I was practically overcome by how terribly sad it all is.

Take your pick of the papers and you could read about Doc or Darryl

walking around more or less in uniform, looking like they're in

fighting shape. Darryl even wandered around the comically named

Tradition Field with a bat. Thinking about that tonight, I wanted to

know: What would it have taken to get him in the cage? And if he'd roped one out? And then, in June, a minor-league deal….

I know, crazy. But as you noted, Darryl is 43 — a year younger than

Andres Galarraga and about a decade younger than Julio Franco. Doc

turned 40 in November.

In some parallel universe we're wondering if they'll hook on for

another season somewhere, and arguing about whether or not the decision

to let Doc and Darryl go after the '99 campaign was right. In that

parallel universe I'm insisting that Father Time was clearly having its

way with them then and busting out some newfangled stats I don't really

understand to prove it was time to move on, and you're reminding me

that next time I think such heretical thoughts, I need to look at that

string of World Championship flags, eyeball the 16 and 18 above the

left-field fence, think about how no one's really talked about the

Yankees in this city since Jesse Orosco's glove went up and didn't come

down, and find a stat that evaluates that.

But instead we live in this universe, where Darryl and Doc went

thataway, like the ones who meant everything to us or looked like they

would so often do. Todd Hundley burned like paper in fire. Edgardo

Alfonzo's back had a time bomb in it. Izzy and Pulse and Wilson spent

exactly zero starts in the rotation together. Now we have David Wright,

and you want to imagine cheering on a warm Indian summer day in 2023

when the cover drops off the new 5 out there on the wall by Casey and

Gil and Tom Terrific. But you'd be a fool to do that, no matter how

sweet David Wright's swing is or how he seems to have sprung full-blown

from one of those kids' baseball books from the 50s. The odds are not in

our favor; we can bitch all we want about our lost jewels, but it's

life that makes the donuts.

Whew! No blogging after midnight if it's going to be this doomy!

Here's something better: We aren't scheduled to play a single game on

artificial turf this year. Not one. To which I could add that we won't

hear a single Montreal air horn going BRAAAAAAAAP in the middle of an extravagantly pointless 5-1 affair, but we already knew that.

Article printed from
Faith and Fear in Flushing:
http://www.faithandfearinflushing.com